


blood in the cut

by Verbyna



Series: rifle, scissor, stone [5]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Americana, Assassins & Hitmen, Codependency, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Eric "what is mercy" Bittle, Guns, Interrogation, Kent "been there done that" Parson, Kidnapping, M/M, Mental Instability, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence, abandoned gas stations, assassins meet-cute without the cute part, reference to a fifteenth century knife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 12:43:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10991175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: “George says you’re the next Jack,” Kent says, voice low enough to cut under the crickets. “But there’s no next Jack, is there? You’re the next blond who tries not to die behind him.”





	blood in the cut

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedusaur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedusaur/gifts).



> oops forgot to post this yesterday. anyway, here's some Truly Messed Up bittyparse in the murderverse, hope y'all enjoy
> 
> thanks as always to jedusaur for the beta and enabling <3 i'm soundslikepenance on tumblr

“Parson’s on site to relieve George,” says Snowy on comms, and Eric almost drops his gun. “George’s taking the comms from Rhodey HQ. Fitzgerald, you’re on point. Hold for orders. Control, out.”

Fitzgerald squints at Eric in the dark before tapping his mic twice for clear copy. He elbows Eric and mouths, _what?_

 _Parson,_ Eric mouths back, wide-eyed and waving his arms a little, gun and all. He’s a sane person who is having a sane reaction to Kent Parson suddenly joining the team while their point is being beaten to a pulp on the other side of a flimsy closet door.

He gets a shrug and a feral smile in reply. It makes sense, Eric decides, after a few more seconds of mental contortions punctuated by pained grunts and an unpleasant snapping sound. Fitz is Mashkov’s rookie. If Kent fucking Parson wants to have a go at the guys doing this to Alexei, of course Fitz isn’t objecting; George’s team isn’t known for being forgiving, they get ugly. They have a full-time cleanup crew for a reason, and he’s heard Shitty call their base in Providence the Abattoir. Jack didn’t even call Shitty out on it, and Jack’s only hobbies, as far as Eric can tell, are collecting exotic knives and maintaining protocol at all times.

Kent was George’s, too. Eric’s known this for months. He just didn’t think she’d close Abattoir ranks to the point of suspending the hit on Kent to let him loose on these poor bastards. Eric thought she’d debrief them herself - at which point it occurs to him that she considers Kent worse punishment than she is, and he has to take a deep breath before he starts shooting through the closet door like a rat chewing its way out of a box.

Lord help him, he almost flies off the handle before orders come in.

 

+

 

The hostiles take Mashkov before George can deploy an extraction team, but Eric and Fitz bring a captive back to the safehouse. Eric tries not to look at her too closely as they bundle her into the trunk; no point giving faces to his nightmares. He’ll likely see her pinned like a dissection specimen when Kent’s done with her.

Fitz takes over the dragging-her-in part of the operation after Eric parks the car kitty-corner to the building and unlocks the trunk. Control put them on standby pending developments, Snowy’s updates increasingly technical until George switched him to a secondary channel and told Fitz to take first shift. It’s almost 0300, so Eric could technically sleep until at least 0700.

He can’t. It’s not just the strange missing-step feeling of not having Jack within reach in the field, though that plays a larger part than he’d admit. It’s also where they are: an abandoned gas station outside Danville, just over the North Carolina border, the furthest south Eric’s been since he left home. He can feel his Daddy’s breath on the back of his neck; if he strains, he can hear gunshots through the trees.

And Kent Parson, who dumped Jack on the side of the road three months ago with a collapsed lung and a fifteenth century misericorde pinning his torn shirt to the bottom of the ditch, is watching him from the doorway.

Eric’s mind roils, seeing him there. He remembers his Ezekiel, God saying His highest creation is the seal of perfection and perfect in beauty, how he was full of wisdom before he fell, except Kent Parson’s looks are an accident and that boy’s crazier than a sprayed cockroach. Standing here beside the car in his tac vest, Eric feels both ridiculous and exposed, all alone with someone so terrible that they count his torn up care in broken ribs.

“George says you’re the next Jack,” Kent says, voice low enough to cut under the crickets. “But there’s no next Jack, is there? You’re the next blond fucker who tries not to die behind him.”

“I’m Eric,” Eric offers, wishing he was at a loss in the conversation instead of smarting from the implications.

“Welcome to Abattoir Two, kiddo. Step right in.” He’s holding the filthy screen door open for Eric, but he’s looking over his head, into the dull, dark sky. And suddenly Eric wants to be seen, here on the edge of his Daddy’s hunting grounds, by someone worse than his ghosts. Seen the way Georgia sees right through him, except without the mercy, so he can fix the weak spots before he gets comfortable walking around them.

“It’ll hold,” he says, missing the comfort of his triggers when his hands clench in his pockets. “I ain’t ready to sleep in that matchbox.”

When Kent steps forward, the weak overheard light turns his face into a skull, but his eyes stay clear and focused. _Not dead yet,_ sings Eric’s blood. _Not dead, not dead, not dead._

If this is what the devil’s own company feels like, Eric almost wishes he weren’t baptized.

 

+

 

Kent has to wait in between his trips to the derelict office where he’s working her over, and Eric has time to wonder why Parson - brains on the walls, guts around chair legs, last resort in dark corners Parson - is _Kent_ to him.

That’s what Jack called him when he told Eric to never come after Jack when Kent has him. That’s what Alicia Zimmermann called him when Eric had pneumonia and she took the opportunity to debrief Eric while he was high. That’s what George called him when she set up a private channel for Kent two nights ago.

He’s Kent when he wipes his bloody hand on his shirt before he takes the protein bar Fitz is holding out. He’s Kent when he slips a garotte onto the dusty shelf where Eric is running through his depleted ammo, midway through Fitz’s second shift, forty hours since Eric last slept.

He’s Kent when he knees Eric’s shoulder so he’ll slump over into proper sleep two hours before his third shift starts, blood crusting Kent’s white henley by now, a few flaking spatters on his ankle when Eric tries to bat it away.

Eric dreams about every charnel house scene that Kent made of Jack’s targets. He dreams that it’s his own hands sliding nail-first through interstitial muscles, his own voice saying it’s okay to let go, his own shoulder aching after holding Jack upright by the neck for hours. His own voice asking, _Is this it? Is this all I get for falling?_

He’ll never be Kent. He knows this, because he knows himself: he’s not that loyal, not that clinical, not that in love, not that cruel. But if there won’t be another Kent, no one will ever get how it is with Jack, and the loneliness is enough to choke Eric when he watches over the fields surrounding the gas station. It’s enough to override his fear and make him seek out Kent’s wordless, watchful company.

 

+

 

Eric doesn’t do well with silence. When he was younger, silence meant his Daddy was out hunting. After silence came the mercy; slitting throats and breaking spines, in the woods and in the shed, deer and people all screaming the same. Silence meant Eric wasn’t merciful enough to go out with Daddy and his buddies, not good enough for the culling. Too young and weak. Too soft, always. Even Jack thinks he’s soft when Eric gives game a fair shot instead of a killing shot, and Jack should know better.

Back at the dorms, Eric has a smart TV to trawl Youtube every second he’s not training. And even when he’s training, Jack walks him through his faults, or puts Eric on edge enough that he mentally fills the silences with things he could tell Jack if he was brave enough. Out here at the safehouse, he’s just an operative on standby. Jack doesn’t have clearance to follow the mission and critique his every move, and other than the occasional screams from their hostage, it’s unbearably quiet.

If it’s dark out, Eric slips into old habits a couple of hours into his watch. He breathes out all his favorite songs, the ones that sound like normal problems. He vibrates in place, crazy as a betsy bug, when he forgets a line.

Kent is in the pliers and promises stage, so he has to leave the captive alone a lot. There’s nowhere to go except for the roof. Eric reckons Kent doesn’t talk to Fitz as much as he talks to Eric. Because Fitz isn’t as close to the blade’s edge as Eric is, and Fitz doesn’t work with Jack, and Fitz wouldn’t kill for Jack the way Eric and Kent would, with the relief of a job well done.

Every time Kent comes up to the roof, Eric forgives another broken rib, another day sidelined as Jack recovered. Never all of them. Never all the way, but when he finds himself taking his finger off the trigger guard to touch his earbud for the tenth time in one watch, he starts to understand.

Making yourself quiet enough to hear Jack means making yourself quiet. And that, despite everything, is a relief.

 

+

 

Two hours before Kent’s bounty is reactivated and Jean-Claude and Nicholas arrive to clean up the shreds of their captive, Eric does something very stupid: he grabs Kent’s filthy, slippery arm and pulls himself closer to the warm hollow of Kent’s body. It’s minuscule comfort that Jack will never accept the hollowness that is Kent Parson now - not Kenny but a fairytale monster with a backstory to match.

If Eric is honest, he wants neither comfort nor absolution. He just wants understanding, and Kent was made to understand everything. Eric’s fear of the killer instinct, of how good he is at ending life and feeling nothing in the aftermath, of the things he would do for Jack Zimmermann even if Jack is as likely to hate as praise him for it; Eric doesn’t have to explain, and he doesn’t need to apologize. Not here.

Kent cups his jaw and drags his thumb across Eric’s lower lip. The old blood is disgusting, but there’s space enough between the rot-iron stench and plastic drag of it and Eric’s desperate need to confess without saying anything.

Kent’s fingers go around Eric’s throat as his thumb slips into Eric’s mouth. His thigh pushes between Eric’s legs, pins him against the dirty whitewashed bricks of the gas station, and Eric almost sobs with the lack of expectations.

“I would--” he starts, painfully, but Kent cuts him off.

“I know. Anything. Anything for him. And you don’t even like him. You like _me.” ___

__Kent was taught never to interrupt. What does it take, Eric wonders, to compel Kent to fill in the answer? Like he’s just contradicting a flat-earther instead of stomping down on every instinct that was beaten and pushed into him?_ _

__“When he lets himself go,” Kent whispers in Eric’s ear, “he remembers who he is. When we were kids and he wasn’t alone.” Kent’s other hand lets go of Eric’s wrist and trails down to the edge of his tac vest, then below his waistband, timed to his words._ _

__“I have to crack him open, and I always think he might’ve killed himself since last time, turned himself into a robot, but he never does. He’s right there. And you know what?”_ _

__Kent’s hand is all the way down Eric’s jeans now, cupping the base of his dick and his balls and touching his hole as gentle as his words aren’t. Eric shakes his head no, because he doesn’t know what. Both his arms are around Kent’s waist, pulling him in, and he’s no less terrified than he was at the start, when he only knew Kent by reputation._ _

__“He’ll never be less than that. That’s the big secret,” Kent says. “We’d kill for every one of his flaws, and that’s why. Everything he hates about himself is him, and we only get the worst, the fake robot shit, but he glitches, and God. God, imagine being loved by that. Imagine being good enough for that.”_ _

__Eric knows this isn’t a blessing to take Jack from Kent, but he does imagine it. Again, because he’s been looking away from the truth since his second training session with Jack. He knows the shape of this need and he lets Kent’s words fill it, lets the knowledge of it being filled before, the possiblity of it, tip him over._ _

__It wouldn’t do anything for him. He’d still be Dicky Bittle, gunpowder residue and iron fillings in the creases of his palms, not merciful enough to put anything out of its misery without enjoying it. Too good at it not to enjoy it, too weak not to show off before Jack, who wants perfection the way Eric’s dad chased penance._ _

__It wouldn’t change anything, but he imagines it: Jack letting himself be, and Eric’s savagery enough to keep him safe. Jack resting because Eric won’t._ _

__

__+_ _

__

__When they come for Kent, he’s already portioned off the captive for Jean-Claude and Nicholas to dispose of and knocked Fitz out for the sake of convenience. His eyes are closed for a moment, finger to his earbud and whatever George is telling him, and Eric considers shooting him._ _

__He doesn’t. He walks to the front door, sits down against the wall, and pretends he was keeping watch. Kent tips his head at him before he slips away to God knows where._ _

__George says, “Beta team, move in. Jack on point. Fire at will.”_ _

__Eric gets out of the way and makes himself small when they barge in. He doesn’t resent George for the precaution. If there was anything in him left to turn, Kent would’ve done it by now._ _

__The next time Kent takes Jack, Eric doesn’t even request to join the extraction team. He camps out in the medical wing, and he waits, grateful that he’ll never have to do this himself as long as Kent’s around._ _


End file.
